October 6, 2012

From Friday's NYT, a good example of the current conventional wisdom about The Gap: few African-Americans do well enough in math to get into Stuyvesant High School because their mothers didn't teach them enough English words (unlike, presumably, all those Stuyvesant students whose mothers don't speak English at all).

... Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.

This issue, though seemingly crucial, has been obscured in the recently intensified debate over the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the multiple-choice exam used as the sole metric for entrance into some of New York City’s elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

... Two weeks ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with other organizations, filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the single-score admissions process as perilously narrow and arguing that it negatively affected black and Hispanic children, who are grossly underrepresented in these schools, so long considered forceful agents of mobility. ...

As the complaint makes note, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the current school year, only 19 were black and 32 Hispanic. During the previous school year, only 3.5 percent of students at Bronx Science were black and 7.2 percent Hispanic.

Okay, but Stuyvesant is 72% Asian and Bronx Science 62% Asian. And a large fraction of those are children of immigrants who often struggle with English.

And the test is 50% math, and the verbal portion is highly oriented toward logic.

How does the Hart-Risley vocabulary theory explain Stuyvesant?

As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success.

I suspect that there is actually strong evidence that "the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success" but that nobody has come close to proving that "increasing" them matters much, and that even if it does, nobody knows how to reliably accomplish that.

Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.

Actually, six year old are extremely good at arriving at school and learning the accents, slang, even the entire new language of the kids on the playground. Smallish children can quickly adapt to speaking a different language from their parents. (Here's my 2000 article, with quotes from Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, on the facility with which children can learn new languages.) That's why Ron Unz's successful 1998 initiative to reduce bilingual education in California didn't cause all the doom and gloom that people in the bilingual ed racket predicted: once the schools made clear that the kids were supposed to learn English, they learned English. English is cool.

By the way, an article seven years ago in the NYT sort of pointed out that the way the exam for the NYC elite public high schools ranks scores gives Asian immigrants an advantage. Has this system been altered since then?

For weeks, Joshua N. Feinman had graded practice tests to help his daughter prepare for New York City's specialized high school exam. Then one day, he took a hard look at the scoring chart from her private test-prep class and was stunned by how the verbal and math scores added up.

''I took a look and said, 'Wow, this thing is really nonlinear,' '' said Mr. Feinman, the chief economist of Deutsche Asset Management. '' 'Wow, it's much better to score high in one and low in the other than to score good in both.' ''

Mr. Feinman had stumbled on a little-known facet of the test: because of the complex way it is graded, a student scoring extremely high on one part of the exam has a sharp advantage over a student with high but more balanced scores in each subject.

For Mr. Feinman's daughter, Amanda, and more than 26,000 other eighth graders who will get their results in February, the implications loom large. Last year, for instance, a student with a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School -- the most coveted specialized school -- but a student with a 97 in math and 92 in verbal would not. ...

City education officials and the company that has prepared the test since 1983, American Guidance Service, said that they were aware of the potential outcomes and that scoring for the exam had to be designed this way to identify the best test takers. They also said their hands were tied by state law, which they said required that admission to the specialized schools be based on a single combined score in math and verbal. ...

''Stuyvesant loves lopsided geniuses,'' said Naomi Bushman, a mathematics education consultant who runs a test-prep course for the exam. ...

Principals said they were aware that a super-high score on one part could substantially lift an applicant's chances, because many recent immigrants with extremely limited English skills had earned admission by posting exceptional math scores.

There just aren't very many "lopsided geniuses" among NAMS. Going to a more balanced scoring system would benefit blacks and Hispanics, but it would also benefit whites, so I guess we can't do that.

115 comments:

As a Stuyvesant grad, class of '69, I can say with authority that the math specialists who had little English more than made up for their linguistic shortfall during their years at Stuy. In my life I have never found a school - at any level - where pure achievement was so prized as it was there. I owe that school a lot. Any attempt to tamper with the "fairness" of leaving out students who didn't make the grade will avail them little, and steal something precious from the high achievers (and the society) that schools like this are designed to serve. Can't we agree that we, as a society, need to nurture our geniuses, even if a few great great great grandchildren of slaves are left to achieve when they actually, y'know, deserve. It is not genius that gets one into a school like Stuyvesant, it is attitude and WORK. Involved parents help too...

The NAACP doesn't account at all for Stuyvesant's Asian students who aren't rich, come from immigrant families, and got in without any race-based preferential treatment. Instead, the NAACP lumps Asians with whites, then blames the whole thing on white privilege. Asians should be angry at the NAACP just for the racism, but if the NAACP wins, Asian students stand to lose the most.

" because their mothers didn't teach them enough English words (unlike, presumably, all those Stuyvesant students whose mothers don't speak English at all)."

Who said it was all about learning English? If child hears millions of words more, it means his brains get much more of training. Child with speech rich environment has to remember much more words and figure out much comlex sentences.

Do people like this really not know reality? Are they liars or simply in denial? Rushton (may he rest in peace) laid it all out in his work. East Asians are better than Europeans in mathematics due to intrinsic genetic differences while Africans are worse.

Contrary to what many believe, verbal is indeed a better predictor of higher intelligence than mathematical proficiency.

In short, if you have a very high verbal IQ, your mathematical IQ is closer to your verbal IQ than if you would have a very high mathematical IQ(then your verbal IQ is typically lower than it would be if the situation was reversed).

This is also manifested that the most math-heavy areas of science, like physics, tend to produce (at the very highest levels) scientists who are very capable verbally. Einstein's witticism is a case in point. Feynman's verbal veracity is another. Niels Bohr, a third.

Again, Jews tend to be both highly verbal(their highest IQ tend to be verbal, with mathematical not far behind), which is part of the reason why they've done great in highly mathematical areas(and I know this is contradictive).

There's also been speculation that high verbal IQ, together with a high(or even higher) mathematical IQ leads to more creativity.

It's based on the 1950s study of a bunch of Nobel winners or people at their highest end in their respective Ivy universities.

The last point has been speculation and has to be treated as such, but my initial point(that higher verbal IQ is a better predictor of overall IQ than higher mathematical IQ) has been proved.

Remember, most IQ tests should have a strong verbal and non-verbal part. An IQ test that only tests for mathematical, non-verbal areas isn't an IQ test. It's a math test(disguised as "reasoning").

On Asians

First, 1 million Indian-Americans live in the New York area.

Why does this matter?

Well, they are the most education group in America. 70% of all Indian-Americans have a bachelors degree or more, but only 8% in their home country do.

They send a lot of kids to these schools.

In short, the myth of the 'poor Asian immigrant' is just that. Sure, there are Asians who aren't very rich but academically education parents still tend to have stable incomes at above-average levels.

This, together with the higher-than-average levels of IQ people with education tend to have means that these kids don't exactly come from poor, non-academic homes.

This is rarely mentioned because a lot of kids who are white who go to these schools also come from a similar background(many whose parents work at typical SWPL institutions like the NYT or similar places).

So these people are having a hard time balancing this as it is, now you want to add class into the mix too? Kiss your elite schools goodbye if that happens.

I've actually gone through the data. If you control for parental educational level and income, Asians are actually less proportionate at these schools than whites. 31 % of all whites who take the exam pass it, vs 35% of asians.

(Remember, the amount of these elite schools are more than a dozen, not just two as often mentioned, because they tend to have Asians concentrated in them).

Add to that, twice as many Asians take the test(again, see their wealthier, more academic background).

People often forget that we get the Asian top 10%(or in the case of India, the top 1%). These are not your average Joe's.

Indian school kids, in the latest PISA(nicknamed "2009+"), scored below Kazakhstan in their test, despite that only two of their most high-performing areas participated.

Keep that in mind, when you contrast the kind of Asian immigrants(and their offspring, who are in these schools) we are getting, with the average Asian back in their homeland.

When I was living in Germany as an exchange student, I met with "elite" French and American students, and they did not outshine the Germans, English, Dutch or Scandinavians.

The only real effect I witnessed from the elite schooling, was that it created a wedge between French and American students, where the non-elite students preferred foreigners to their own elite.

I also suspect that elite schooling decreases innovation, as the intelligent children learn that teachers and professors are smart people that are correct, rater than idiots that don't understand.

On a tangential note, one of the elite Americans sought out a Church she could attend, a clear indication of what happens when your religious teachers are good, compared to the semi-retards that tried to instill the fear of god in public school system.

Of course, if the NAACP gets its way and high schools like Stuyvesant start admitting unqualified blacks and Hispanics, then the school will be subjected to a lawsuit because blacks and Hispanics are failing at a much higher rate than Asians and whites.

The only solution to higher failure rates will be the lower standards so that everyone can pass. The final result will be the school will have such low standards that all of the Asians and whites will no longer want to send their children there. The school will be filled with low achieving blacks and Hispanics and no one will care that the school is no longer academically a good school and no longer really diverse.

Wow, I had never heard about that quirk of the scoring system before. Now the extremely high proportion of East Asians in Stuyvesant makes a lot more sense to me.

Top American public schools should be tuned to nurturing a broad cross-section of American genius, not a narrow slice that is currently better-adapted to modern schools than the majority. (And yes, I say this as a member of the narrow slice.)

The scoring does seem pretty messed up. Among people who aren't taking a test in a second language (which should be most of the takers), a disproportionate result in one area vs. another is often a sign of a learning disability. People with more rounded excellence (say a 90 or 95 on both verbal and math) will often do better overall in life than someone who gets a 99 math and a 49 verbal.

Of course, the screwed up way this country is going, maybe the best result is to get a 20 on everything and have life on easy street getting handouts.

If so, shouldn't white kids then just train the verbal side since that's where their comparative advantage lies?"

You should train both sides to the best of your ability and let the chips fall where they may. Most kids no matter how hard they train cannot get 90+% in either, and additional effort beyond a certain threshold in a certain area will yield diminishing returns. You want to do the best you can do in both. I'm sure despite this scoring inconsistency, that the schools would still rather have someone who scores a 98 on one scale and a 69 on the other than a 98 on one scale and a 49 on the other.

Who said it was all about learning English? If child hears millions of words more, it means his brains get much more of training. Child with speech rich environment has to remember much more words and figure out much comlex sentences.

Only recently in Canada have we been discussing the achievement gap. Here is an interesting breakdown by race/ethnicity of the proportion of students that meet or exceed the Ontario provincial standard in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB).

'I suspect that there is actually strong evidence that "the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success" but that nobody has come close to proving that "increasing" them matters much, and that even if it does, nobody knows how to reliably accomplish that.'

Adoption studies where white parents adopt black babies have found that the black adoptees outperform other blacks on IQ tests at early ages, which reflect "general knowledge and vocabulary". This outperformance fades away by high school. In general, I think enriched environments can produce gains at early ages, but there is very littler persistence. There is also the question of who will do the enriching and who will pay for it. Society is better off if the idealistic young white women of Head Start were having and raising their own children, and if they and their husbands were taxed lightly enough to afford large families, as the Romneys could.

"''Stuyvesant loves lopsided geniuses,'' said Naomi Bushman, a mathematics education consultant who runs a test-prep course for the exam. ..."

So does the National Merit Scholarship Corporation who doubles the verbal score before adding it to the math, yet somehow Asians still do spectacularly well. I believe that even if you put in a new inventory "shooting hoops from the back court," within about three years or so Asians would master that too. Chinese and Korean parents would all put up basketball hoops on their garages and start basketball shooting after school programs, and kids would go right from their piano lessons to the local Chinese Church to shoot baskets in the basement.

Asian boys oughta file a lawsuit against NBA, NFL, US track, and porn for discriminating against Asian males. And Asian males should file sex inequality claims since many more white and black guys get Asian women than Asian guys get white or black women. They can use 'be love colorblind' as proof. Lol.

We have had large scale Asian immigration for 3 decades now, and accompanying overrepresentation, even domination, of Asians at many of the elite public institutions founded and built up mostly by whites. Yet it seems to me that the benefits of this massive demographic shift aren't that great. Is technological progress that much more rapid then when midWestern white guys dominated Silicon Valley? Sure there has been a lot of progress, say, in the twenty eight years since 1984 ( I pick that years because the Mac was first introduced). But think of where we were at 28 years before that.

Seems to me that whites were perfectly capable of building a high tech society without a huge presence of Asians, and that much of the benefit of high IQ Asians is cancelled out by crowding out whties.

I wonder if the test is criterion or norm referenced. I suspect it's a combination. Because either whites are getting in with similar lopsided scores (as one of the anonymi suggests) or no high verbal scores are gotten at all. The latter strikes me as quite possible.

Using the GRE as an example: if the school says we'll take all kids who get a math or verbal score of 700, no matter what their other score is, they'd get a huge number of math 700s and almost no verbals.

"If so, shouldn't white kids then just train the verbal side since that's where their comparative advantage lies?"

You don't 'train' the verbal side, Champ. You don't 'train' anything, it's impossible. What you come out of the womb with, is what you die with; this is an HBD blog, the "D" might as well stand for "destination."

If so, shouldn't white kids then just train the verbal side since that's where their comparative advantage lies?

I seriously doubt verbal is going to be emphasized any time soon, mainly because it's not playwrights, journalists and lawyers who contribute to our standard of living, but scientific eggheads who come up with things like the internal combustion engine and the Haber process.

I'll tell you what improved my vocabulary and general knowledge as a child: my parents got me some "Calvin and Hobbes" books. As a boy, I thought they were awesome stories about a boy and his tiger riding their wagon off of cliffs. As an adult, I'm amazed that Bill Waterson was able to cram so much philosophy into a Sunday morning comic.

The thing that goes bizarrely unstated in these sort of naacp complaints is that there is no special bonus from going to stuyvesant. Its not easier to get into college from stuyvesant, its harder, as elite colleges only take at most 10 or so students from any given high school, and everyone at stuyvesant has straight As and 700+ sat scores. Nor are the teachers any better, stuyvesant has the same teachers that every other nyc public school gets, some are good, some aren't. My stuyvesant homeroom teacher was arrested for selling guns to a NYPD agent he thought was a hamas member. Nor does the board of ed give stuyvesant more funding per student than any other public school. The only thing that makes stuyvesant "elite" is that people call it that, and the student bodyitself.

Basically the best solution to the NAACP's complaint would be to let the NAACP decide on the manner of admissions for stuyvesant, keep calling it an elite public high school, and have the city create a new school (it could call it "buyvesant") that uses the same standardized test that stuyvesant uses. That way "elite magnet school, styuvesant high" will be 65% black and latino and the kids who currently go to stuyvesant could be in the same educational environment they've always been in

They also said their hands were tied by state law, which they said required that admission to the specialized schools be based on a single combined score in math and verbal.

Perhaps this is an error on the part of the reporter, but this sentence contradicts the other information provided, namely that a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal beats a 97 percentile in math and 92 in verbal. (Assuming that the distribution of scores is similar for both math and verbal)

Lopsided genius eh? I guess then they will acknowledge the millions upon millions of white kids- particularly white girls- who score very high on verbal standardized tests but only around average on math. Something tells me this scenario is magnitudes more common than a "lopsided" math-oriented NAM genius.

Maybe they all need expedited entrance to Stuyvesant, and lots and lots of articles penned about the phenomenon. They need special outreach programs too.

I suspect that the magnate schools (stuy, science and B k tech) will go the way of the NYPD and FDNY - lowered standards - then liberals can triumphently claim that more blacks are in magnate schools = as steve said, they aren't even trying to make sense anymore.

I guess no one's ever followed identical twins separated at birth and studied the differential that results when one is raised in a wordy advantaged home and the other in a disadvantaged home. Someone really oughta do that; seems like it might shed some light on the situation.

Word deficit.” It used to be that poor black kids read the King James. Maybe they should go back to that.

Interesting to me is the madrasas the Muslims are said to send poor boys to. Evidently they sit there and chant the Koran in Arabic until they have memorized it. I suspect the Koran is written in high level Arabic so that might work to even the word deficit.

Asians have thrown in their lot with the left, and the reward for that is now coming due.Here's a recent study from about Asian-American attitudes.

See here:http://www.naasurvey.com/resources/Home/NAAS12-sep25-issues.pdf

Notice the part on Affirmative action. Over 70 % support it.

It used to be a lot more conflicted but this is what leftism does to a community.So why bitch now?

Second, what 'white privilege'?Lower-class white students get very heavily discriminated against.

Apparently that doesn't concern you the least and you repeat the same leftist slogans.

It's very hard to build sympathy for yourself when you are denying it to others.

If whites were discriminated against but not Asians you wouldn't have cared at all.As you said in an earlier comment "I only care about the NAACP because its anti-Asian".

Actually, the NAACP has been anti-white(except for rich whites who get in because their daddies donate to the university, but they're a small minority) for a long time.

And you only start to care now.And now you're begging for sympathy. Please.

Second, while many Asian immigrants are not rich, how many academics are?The people who are coming from Asia are highly educated, and while not rich, gives them a chance to hold a steady and a stable job.

It also means that they invest a lot more in their kids than someone whose parents do not have an academic background.

Third, the statistics on Asians in America is very clear: it's a group with above average education among the 1st generation and above-average income.

So the kids to these parents are growing up in homes that are not exactly typically underclass.Not being rich or even in middle income does not mean being poor.

Let's take the Indian-Americans.8 % of their population back home have a bachelors degree.It's over 70 % among U.S. American Indians.There's over 1 million Indian-Americans in the New York area. A lot of Indian kids are in these top schools and for good reason.

But pretending that they and other Asian kids are somehow coming from homes where the parents have no educational background and have a trouble finding a job is pure propaganda and dishonest.

It's pathetic."

Found here:http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2012/09/naacp-et-al-claim-stuyvesant-entrance.html

"Wow, it's much better to score high in one and low in the other than to score good in both."

Or even better, score well.

Anonymous 3AM: I ask myself the same question, and believe the answer is mixed. Some know, but dare not say it aloud. Others really do not know, however precisely the table is set. They sense, perhaps correctly, that on ne brick removed will bring the entire wall down.

"Perhaps this is an error on the part of the reporter, but this sentence contradicts the other information provided, namely that a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal beats a 97 percentile in math and 92 in verbal." (Assuming that the distribution of scores is similar for both math and verbal)"

and both scores weigh the same. from wiki, "The total number of correct answers (the raw score) is converted into a scaled score through a formula that the Department of Education does not release, and which varies from year to year. "

So, what is going on? Is it white liberals complaining about 'white privilege' and calling for more 'inclusiveness' not really to have more blacks and Hispans admitted to Stuy but MORE whites?

That would be pretty clever. Whites trying to undermine the current system cuz it favors Asians over whites. But saying so would be 'racist'. So, complain about 'white privilege' and point to lack of browns and blacks. But under the new system, Asian numbers will be reduced drastically. Though blacks and browns will gain some, the real winners might be whites over Asians. White/Jewish liberals sure are clever. You see, whites are the smartest people. So brilliant in their trickery.

Most of the white toddlers I see on Manhattan's streets are accompanied by non-white women, mostly by Caribbean blacks. In past centuries the children of the aristocracy were usually nursed by peasant women.

If vocabulary dearth was a cause instead of a consequence of stupidity, folk wisdom would have undoubtedly picked up on this. This would have caused upper class mothers of all eras to have spent more time with their kids than we know they actually did.

If I was a closet race-realist working in the ed. business, instead of a closet race-realist working elsewhere, I would try to exploit liberalism's contradictions on this topic in the following ways:

"What do you mean disadvantaged mothers don't talk enough to their children? That's borderline racist. Are you calling them bad mothers? Studies? They're probably biased. Have you ever heard of scientific racism? Remedies? We need to raise awareness about the test in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And what's all this fuss about Stuyvesant HS anyway? Do you think it's somehow better than other schools, do you think most of our schools are inadequate? That's so judgmental, it's such a slur on our teachers and students. Math? That's not the be-all and end-all of education. There are many equally valid ways to educate our children. The next generation will need a broad array of knowledge to cope with the challenges of the future. We can have many different kinds of schools, many diverse approaches to education without calling any one of them better or worse than the rest. Let's leave the attitudes of the past behind."

"I guess no one's ever followed identical twins separated at birth and studied the differential that results when one is raised in a wordy advantaged home and the other in a disadvantaged home. Someone really oughta do that; seems like it might shed some light on the situation."

Those case studies are always very interesting. However, a controlled experiment is impossible, for ethical reasons. And the number of the known cases that it was possible to study is very small. So any conclusion that could be reached from these case studies is considered scientifically invalid.

Students have to live within the 5 boroughs of NYC. According to the wiki of the NYC Department of Education:

"In 2007, Hispanics and Latino students made up 39.4% of the student population. African Americans made up 32.2% of the student population. White American and Asian American students made up 14.2% and 13.7% of the student populace respectively. Native Americans made up the remaining 0.4% of the student body"

That quote is about all NYC public schools, of which Stuyvesant is one.

"....and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty."

It never occurs to these researchers that the one set of parents uses more words and more complicated words because they are smarter on average and therefore their kids are commensurately smarter.

I find stories like this amusing, especially the part where the author reveals the solution that expert opinion suggests: a government or non-profit program of some kind or another.

My god (forhead slap), what a stroke of genius. A program! Whoever would have thought of such a thing? Why that's just the ticket. Hey kids, let's put on a program!

As if the Great Society and the last fifty years of lame-brained, left-wing social experimentation by endowments and governments had not taken place. It's always 1955-1965 for these people - we've all just read "The Other America" or just watched "The Blackboard Jungle". Black musicians are like Chubby Checkers, rather than like Snoop Dogg. Latino gang members sing and dance like in "West Side Story", rather than cut off peoples heads with machetes like MS-13. We all just know that we can solve the problems of negroes and juvenile delinquents if we just try hard enough.

These people think that we have all been blind, deaf, and dumb for the last fifty years. They must think we're schmucks.

Don't be ridiculous. Even if IQ is 100% set at birth (I'd say it's about 95%, but close enough), we're not talking about pure IQ tests here. No, a 50th percentile student can't train his way up to 90%. But a 95% kid might be able to cram his way up to 97%, and it sounds like that could make a difference here.

Teaching in the inner city, I've met many incoming kindergarten students who were completely non-verbal. I've also met a lot of those who don't possess the simplest vocabulary- colors, furniture, seasons, food items, ect.

The possibility of this still amazes me because ALL of these children come from homes with a TV, often multiple TVs of the large screen variety. Inner city children usually live in households with a lot more adult women than adult men, so they are a lot more likely to have Real Housewives of Atlanta than football constantly in the background. From what I understand from the older kids, the TVs in their homes are never ever off. You'd think that trashy reality shows and sleazy talk shows would provide enough different words for a child to not be verbally behind in kindergarten. At the very least, they should be enough to trigger some sort of talking. After all, many immigrant toddlers learn enough English to be functional in kindergarten simply by watching TV (my youngest sibling did).

I seriously think that the non-verbal kids are locked in a closet somewhere before starting school. Or, maybe, as Kylie suggested to me before, that's what mildly to moderately retarded 5 year olds are like when there is no one around to pay special attention to them.

As for the verbal, responsive, talkative children who are missing patches of basic vocabulary, perhaps they just aren't as good at catching, retaining and applying new information.

Then why are most of history's great mathematicians palefaces, from Pythagoras and Archimedes to Newton and Leibniz and Gauss and so on to the present?

No, east Asians did not invent the number symbols West and East and everybody in between uses, either.

My guess is that the Chinese are eminently practical, and aren't much interested in wasting resources on documenting the counting coup aspects of who did what first. They're focused, in a monomaniacal fashion, on catching up with the West in the here and now rather than recounting the glories of the past, such as they were. Perhaps they'll do more of that once they've caught up and are stuck in the doldrums.

"I suspect that the magnate schools (stuy, science and B k tech) will go the way of the NYPD and FDNY - lowered standards - then liberals can triumphently claim that more blacks are in magnate schools = as steve said, they aren't even trying to make sense anymore."

Perhaps a good way to create a magnet school without attracting too much attention from those who insist on lower standards would be to make the school specialize in something unpleasant. The admissions would still be merit based, but the magnet would be, er, a ballet school for boys or something. Maybe, making dead languages a major part of the curriculum would be enough to make the functional, but not very talented black kids beg their parents for an alternative and make the functional, but not particularly talented black parents question the practical merits of such a school. (I've noticed that most of the good, middle class black folk tend to see academics as a means to financial success rather than an intellectual pursuit.)

Meanwhile, any group of intelligent kids held to high standards will succeed, even if their school doesn't specialize in the fields of their professional interests. The key is always to get rid of that which causes disruption and lower standards.

I love how, all the statistics the US keeps in the name of verifiable fairness and the energy of groups out for their own benefit, just keeps attention on, and working over the issue, squeezing the truth out the end of the tube. Unlike in France where they just decree that things are fair, and keep no statistics so there can be no solid leverage against that official line and ideology. American earnestness FTW; but I think France probably just knows the score and is more worldly-wise.

It's not the obligation of white people to educate East Asians. Period. It's not the obligation of white people to educate East Asians to become the new overclass. We are always told how super-duper East Asian IQs are yet they still are dying to get into white-created institutions. It doesn't add up. The whole premise East Asians have is that it's America's job to educate them (and give them jobs and buy their stuff).

The SAT is also weighted to raise math scores and level with verbal scores. It was designed so average white American boys and girls got the same score. Without the math advantage white American girls would outscore their male counterparts by 2-3 points on average.

Thanks Anonymous at 10/7/12 8:52am. The list you provided is unimpressive. Out of the thousands of the "best and brightest" in NYC only a few have achieved acclaim in their respective fields and most of them are not even in math or science fields.

>>>> They also said their hands were tied by state law, which they said required that admission to the specialized schools be based on a single combined score in math and verbal. ...

In a polity where even civil service jobs for the sanitation department come under scrutiny for disparate racial impact, who, in the early 1970s, encoded in New York State law that ONLY the admissions test would determine entry into New York City's selective high school, thereby guaranteeing that only a minuscule number of blacks and latins would ever gain entry into these schools. ? Who demanded this legislation even though it has often been this very constituency that is at the forefront of efforts to demand that blacks/latins be proportionally represented in vocations such as police/fire/sanitation/carpenter/iron worker...(but not Hollywood film technicians). Discover.

This constituency did not anticipate the rise of the super competitive Asian whose success has disparately impacted their own opportunities to enroll in these excellent schools (the only decent public schools left in New York).Watch; the law will change.

"The possibility of this still amazes me because ALL of these children come from homes with a TV, often multiple TVs of the large screen variety."

You beat me to it, but I just thought of that too. The poor households I've been in all had multiple TVs blasting all day, often around the clock. They also generally had lots of different people walking in and out, including groups of neighborhood kids. Constant chatter, so those kids should be on top, right?

Compare those kids to the kids of a professorial couple who don't have a TV, or keep their one TV in a cabinet except for when they hear something cultural is on PBS. Maybe the parents are introverts, so it's quiet at the dinner table. At breakfast, mom and dad and buried in their newspaper or text messages. They have only one kid, so there aren't a bunch of other kids talking either. This kid is becoming dumber by the minute, right?

In a polity where even civil service jobs for the sanitation department come under scrutiny for disparate racial impact, who, in the early 1970s, encoded in New York State law that ONLY the admissions test would determine entry into New York City's selective high school, thereby guaranteeing that only a minuscule number of blacks and latins would ever gain entry into these schools. ? Who demanded this legislation even though it has often been this very constituency that is at the forefront of efforts to demand that blacks/latins be proportionally represented in vocations such as police/fire/sanitation/carpenter/iron worker...(but not Hollywood film technicians). Discover.

This constituency did not anticipate the rise of the super competitive Asian whose success has disparately impacted their own opportunities to enroll in these excellent schools (the only decent public schools left in New York).Watch; the law will change.

"the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success" but that nobody has come close to proving that "increasing" them matters much, and that even if it does, nobody knows how to reliably accomplish that.__________________________

I believe some white students do exactly that, and they even have a nickname for them - they're called "Jews":)

The Jewish IQ profile is skewed towards verbal ability, but it is not skewed away from math ability. The deficit relative to White gentiles and Asians is in performance IQ, which correlates with visuo-spatial ability. Math is a mixture of symbolic and visuo-spatial thinking. Jews have performed very well in many branches of pure and applied mathematics e.g. John von Neumann, Hermann Minkowski, Tullio Levi-Civita, Theodor von Karman, Robert von Mises, Edward Witten, etc. fere ad infinitum).

>>The thing that goes bizarrely unstated in these sort of naacp complaints is that there is no special bonus from going to stuyvesant. Its not easier to get into college from stuyvesant, its harder, as elite colleges only take at most 10 or so students from any given high school,

This assertion is incorrect. Back in the day I went to an Ivy and I could not count how many of my classmates went to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. Way, way beyond 10 or so. There may have been as many as 40 from each in my class.

In gaining admission to America's elite universities, having gone to Stuyvesant or Science confers no disadvantage, all other factors being equal.

As a white smart guy, I'd never want to go to a place like Stuyvesant filled with ultra competitive Asians. Send me to a school with some hot girls and some good sports teams, please. The Asians can have it.

I too am sick of Asians complaining about "discrimination" at Ivy type schools. They have vast overrepresentation as it is, and unlike whites, they are leeches who didn't build any of those institutions.

This constituency did not anticipate the rise of the super competitive Asian

A large proportion of NYC metro's middle class secular Jewish families have left the city proper for Long Island or the other suburbs, and the kids aren't even eligible for admission to the exam schools. Wealthy NYC Jews send their kids to private schools. The ultra-Orthodox, whose numbers are on the rise, don't care much about secular education and wouldn't send their kids to an exam school even if they were smart enough to get in. To sum up, I don't think that the Jewish angle is very important to understanding the NAACP lawsuit.

"The SAT is also weighted to raise math scores and level with verbal scores. It was designed so average white American boys and girls got the same score. Without the math advantage white American girls would outscore their male counterparts by 2-3 points on average."

LOL

2-3 points? Seriously? That is just noise on a test with a 600 point scale.

None of the Azns has any objection to AA/quotas/set-asides. They're totally who-whom. They don't dislike AA, they're upset that they're the victims.

If Semitics were split off into a separate category, the Jews would throw hissy fits 'bout how horrible AA is, discriminating 'gainst them and sh!t. Why? The point was hurting whites

Jews were all against putting black criminals in prison until they realized the blacks didn't distinguish between Whites and Jews, then they were all 'stop and frisk' and 'three strikes.'Trying to analyze a non-White's views for principles or whatnot is usually just foolish.

What's s wrong with this? If you think about athletics, well rounded athletes almost never amount to anything. To make it in nba,nfl,MLB, you have to be really good at something. Being well rounded means you will wash out or be a career backup.

Besides the advantage whites have against Asians in verbal is little to none. If you are talking about Jews that is a different story, but regular white people give me a break.

White people are not particularly good at trickery (preferring the straight on battle of annihilation most of the time) and the same is true for Jews, who if the Old Testament (and the reports of Romans, Greeks, Phonecians, Carthaginians, Persians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Egyptians are correct, were stubborn and bull-headed but not very tricky).

Most of this uselessness is due to the absolute desire to believe in what amounts to Christianity 2.0, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. If everyone is equal under the Lord, its a pretty small step to say they're all equal. And it feels good, post-Christian wise. Particularly for a female-dominated society as the West.

HOWEVER, much of it is moot. Clearly the direction people are going is online. Already Stanford is opening up to everyone an intro Computer Networking class. By the time your kids are in say, Middle School, you should be able to enroll them in the online school of your choice, where they won't learn bad habits, get into fights, have sex with each other (or teachers, sadly) or much of anything else that is bad and destructive for kids. Michelle Obama won't be telling them what to eat. They won't have RFID chips in their school IDs (no, really, not kidding).

Even the best physical school is only as good as its worst and most disruptive student allows it to be. Online, there is no problem. Drill is well suited for computers, kids can rewind and re-watch lecture after lecture, to take notes. Individualized instruction can by skyped and shared. Call it the outsourcing of education, and yes there is no reason say Humboldt or University of Milan can't get in the game again. Would you like a nice German professor to teach your middle schooler algebra or LaQueesha from the Department of African-American studies?

Whites with high IQ's go to private schools. Stuyvesant is for intelligent people without upper middle class parents. Furthermore, why would a white person with a family live in the city of New York unless they were wealthy. I am not surprised that Stuyvesant is so heavily asian. I think the asian achievement is a little overhyped. The average asian is not much smarter than the average white American. However, their culture of academic achievement has led to outsized achievement in school.

"How to end truancy. Start Magnet schools. Make black kids eat lots of spinach heavy with iron. And put a giant magnet in every school. That way, all the blacks will be magnetically dragged to school. " - Electro-Magnet schools.

The quest to find the magical test that lets whites beat Asians in cognitive tests continues.

Just like the epic search for the test that lets blacks beat whites in cognitive tests.

And the quest to explain why yellow civilization lags and yellow all want to crowd white living spaces, when the cognitive tests would seem to suggest otherwise.

And the quest to explain the attitude of weirdos who think whites should open their societies to yellows, when yellows don't open theirs to whites (they seem to think "meritocracy" should only apply when it helps yellows get over on whites).

Those case studies are always very interesting. However, a controlled experiment is impossible, for ethical reasons. And the number of the known cases that it was possible to study is very small. So any conclusion that could be reached from these case studies is considered scientifically invalid.

So less-controlled experiments are the best we've got, despite their small sample sizes. And the conclusions reached from these case studies are the best we've got (far better than the nothing the environmental determinists have got). Anyone who rejects these studies has an opinion that is considered scientifically invalid.

My guess is that the Chinese are eminently practical, and aren't much interested in wasting resources on documenting the counting coup aspects of who did what first. They're focused, in a monomaniacal fashion, on catching up with the West in the here and now rather than recounting the glories of the past, such as they were. Perhaps they'll do more of that once they've caught up and are stuck in the doldrums.

It's practical to stick up for your own and kick their enemies in the teeth.

No; "correlation is not causation" and other aspects of intellectual rigor only apply when dealing with hatefacts and hatetheories; when dealing with lovefacts and lovetheories, credulity is the rule, and rigor is hate.

I was thinking about this from the first few paragraphs of Steve's piece, how libtards really seem not to notice how they do these 180 degree pivots as a matter of course. Libtards really need critics to give them reality checks, which must be why they burn critics for heresy.

2-3 points? Seriously? That is just noise on a test with a 600 point scale.

It's not noise if it becomes a 20-year average. Still not much, but not noise, either. Hell, it's pretty close to the white-yellow IQ gap the "you owe me what's yours b-cuz I'm better than you" yellow "cognitive elitists" are always crowing about.

However, their culture of academic achievement has led to outsized achievement in school.

The people who think IQ preeminent and other personality factors negligible when it comes to yellow achievement remind me of the people who think IQ preeminent and other personality factors negligible when it comes to Jewish achievement.

Back in the real world, conscientiousness, nepotism, ethnic identity, and other factors do matter.

Only against FOB's. Second generation East Asians in Britain score higher than native Britons on verbal aptitude tests.

That's apparently true in Canada as well. The really strange aspect of the Asian aptitude for math and the sciences is that these subjects have traditionally been considered the realm of tradespeople, no different from carpentry and metalworking. Jonathan Spence and John King Fairbank have both alluded to the fact that imperial bureaucrats needed to be highly literate in extremely obscure subjects not far removed from modern philosophical discussions, as well as knowledgeable about reams of historical events with relevance to statecraft, but had no training in technical subjects whatsoever.

That’s a positive step and a recognition of a problem, but it’s obviously not enough. Your “anti-Asian” contention is absurd, and, naturally, the “winners” of the test would say that. (Excluding those of us who passed it and moved towards other schools.)

Otherwise, we can just disagree, and not agree on that either. Thank you.

Of course, Latin Tony's sin is racism; his objections have disparate impact - they only burden or target whites and yellows. It's not a race-neutral process, or else we'd see more diversity. The bias isn't just in his process, but in the result.

Not only are a lot of the Asians who excel today often not coming from families where English is the first language, but I'm guessing a lot of the Ashkenazi Jews who have excelled in decades past had parents whose first language wasn't English either. BTW, Bronx has had 7 Nobel Prize winners, 6 of whom were Jewish, and Stuyvesant has had 4, all of whom are Jewish. That's 10 out of 11, clearly unfair preference has been given to Jews in decades past. BTW, both schools have produced a huge number of mathematicians and physicists who have gone on to great things, but they might not cited by the schools and the DOE because it is clear by the names that a big majority of the high achievers are Jewish which of course undermines the whole rationale for affirmative action. How could so many Jews succeed academically with no preferential policies? It's truly baffling.

"The SAT is also weighted to raise math scores and level with verbal scores. It was designed so average white American boys and girls got the same score. Without the math advantage white American girls would outscore their male counterparts by 2-3 points on average."

Boys do better than girls on the math and "verbal" portions of the test.

David Davenport asked: "For example, does anyone in the West aspire to own anything with a Chinese brand name?"

You may wish to check on where the computer you made your comment with was assembled.

Also, I don't know about Chinese brands' U.S. market penetration, but I do know that China's Norinco has sold a good many semi-automatic versions of the Kalashnikov right here in the U.S.A., and sold them to a market segment made up of Americans whom liberals love to demonize as "conservative gun nuts."

"For example, does anyone in the West aspire to own anything with a Chinese brand name?"

You may wish to check on where the computer you made your comment with was assembled.

Here I am right now, typing to you on my Acer Aspire model AO722 netbook. I bought the thing on Amazon earler this year for $335 total price, including shipping. I think the price has gone down since then.

The main reason why I bought this Acer Aspire was low price, not because I aspire to own an Acer product. I feel no loyalty whatsoever to the Acer brand.

And no, peepul don't buy Apple stuff because their Apple gadget was assembled in China.

Also, I don't know about Chinese brands' U.S. market penetration, but I do know that China's Norinco has sold a good many semi-automatic versions of the Kalashnikov right here in the U.S.A., and sold them to a market segment made up of Americans whom liberals love to demonize as "conservative gun nuts."

You're wrong about that. You're also reinforcing my point that the main selling point of Chinese manufactures is cheapness.

If you mean law-abiding white firearms enthusiasts when you say "conservative gun nuts," very few of them aspire to own a chop suey copycat Avtomatik Kalishnikov. There are a number of better selective fire military rifles an American collector can aspire to own.

A cheap Chinese knock-off may be desirable to Mexican gangsters or members of the New Black Panther Party, 'cuz the price is lower ... maybe even free if if they can get their item from Attorney Criminal Eric Holder's Injustice Dept.

We propose the rise of crack cocaine markets as an explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomesbeginning in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure to date thearrival of crack markets in cities and states, we show large increases in murder and incarceration rates after these dates. Black high school graduation rates also decline, and we estimate that crackmarkets accounts for between 40 and 73 percent of the fall in blackmale high school graduation rates. We argue that the primary mechanism is reduced educational investments in response to decreased returns to schooling.

1) Ain't no white people at Stuy High when I was there it was mostly Asians now it is almost all Asians.

2) Ain't many Americans among the Blacks. My guess is if the NAACP is successful it will be the children of diplomats, rich Caribbeans , and maybe a few children of African immigrants that get spots.. I would not surprised if it was not rich Caribbeans behind this.

Whiskey said...White people are not particularly good at trickery ... and the same is true for Jews, who if the Old Testament (and the reports of Romans, Greeks, Phonecians, Carthaginians, Persians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Egyptians are correct, were stubborn and bull-headed but not very tricky).

The mind boggles at Whiskey's ignorance and/or dishonesty. The Jews were viewed in the ancient world as "a race of thieves and robbers" in Strabo's words.

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